


Build Your Home Up From the Earth

by interlude



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, An AU Where Spacekru Gets Their 80 Acres, Bellamy-centric, F/M, Gen, Post-Season/Series 05, SPACE SQUAD, kind of, spacekru
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-24 16:52:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15634797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/interlude/pseuds/interlude
Summary: Prompted on Tumblr.In the wake of the war, Spacekru are given their 80 acres in Eden. Bellamy decides he wants to build a house and works through his feelings while he does.A very introspective look at Bellamy's thoughts and emotions and messy relationships after (most of) the events of season 5.





	Build Your Home Up From the Earth

They’ve been living in the valley for about two weeks when Bellamy starts thinking about building a house.

“Why?” Murphy asks when he tells him, Monty, and Raven sometime later. “Tent’s not good enough for you?”

The tent they’re in is identical to the other three they’ve been given – gifts from his sister, who had used the very last of her influence over Wonkru to give them to him. It’s an apology, he thinks. It’s not a very good one. He didn’t thank her when she handed them over; he couldn’t find the words. Weeks later, he’s still not sure there are any still in him, and he thinks that Octavia knows it too – he hasn’t seen her since. Her absence is a relief and an ache all at once.

They’re sturdy tents – better than they’d had from the Dropship all those years ago, certainly, and they’re an upgrade from the cold, artificially-lit rooms on the Ring. All things considered, they aren’t a bad gift. They aren’t a bad home. The seven – well, eight of them now, with Shaw, who just followed Raven until he stuck – have made it work: Echo and him in one, Monty and Harper in another, Emori and Raven in the third, and Murphy and Shaw as unenthusiastic roommates in the fourth. (He’d been meaning to ask Shaw how that was going, actually. From what he’s gathered – poorly.)

It’s not ideal, but it works, and surrounded by their 80 acres of Eden and far removed from the others, it’s not a bad set-up.

Maybe it’s because they remind him of his sister that he doesn’t want to keep living in them. Maybe it’s just how impermanent they seem.

It feels wrong to have something so easily torn down here. Bellamy’s lost and found so many homes since the first time he came to the ground, and living in a tent only makes him wonder when he’ll lose this one, too. If this place really is meant to be their last home, he wants to build something long-lasting – something sturdy to root in and grow, like the garden Monty’s already begun planting.

He wants to construct a home that’s completely of the Earth, built from the trees around them and laid upon the ground beneath them, cut completely from the Ark and the bunker and Wonkru and his sister in every way. The tent reminds him of his past. He wants to build his future.

Bellamy doesn’t think he can explain that to Murphy. The other man would probably just laugh.

Instead he shrugs and says, “We shouldn’t have to live in tents forever. It’d be nice to have a real house.”

“I’m in,” Raven says. “I’m sick of waking up wet when it rains. A house would be nice.”

“It could be nice,” Monty says. “I don’t know. I’ve never been in one.” Bellamy doesn’t point out that none of them really have. Their rooms in Arkadia didn’t count.

“I have,” Murphy says as he lays down on the floor, crossing his arms behind his head and stretching his legs out. He takes up nearly half the floor and the others have to scoot aside to accommodate him, but he doesn’t seem to care. “They’re nice.”

“Becca’s place wasn’t a house,” Raven argues, pushing his legs away from her. “It was a mansion. We’re not going to make anything that fancy. Don’t expect indoor plumbing and running water.”

“What’s even the point, then? Sounds like a lot of hard work for nothing,” Murphy says dryly. Bellamy considers pointing out that he wasn’t asking for his opinion in the first place – he’d only asked Raven and Monty here for their expertise; Murphy just tagged along. Bellamy would ask why he was even here if he didn’t already know the answer. Emori is sparring with the others in the clearing – since Murphy’s still avoiding her, his options were here or solitude.

“You could stop rooming with Shaw if we build enough of them,” Raven tells him.

Murphy sits up quickly. “Alright, I’m in. What do I need to do?”

Raven rolls her eyes and mutters something under her breath Bellamy doesn’t catch.

“Okay, but how do we do this?” Monty asks, bringing them all back to reality before they get too excited. “I’m a mechanical engineer. I don’t know how to build anything with wood.”

“Come on, Monty,” Raven says, patting him on the shoulder. “With the two of us working on it, we’ll figure it out. No problem.”

 

* * *

 

The three of them spend about a week arguing over the plans while Murphy provides his unwanted comments. Raven thinks bigger is better. She has a million ideas for the design and tries to include all of them. Monty thinks that because it’s the first house they’ve ever built, they should play it safe – why would Echo and Bellamy need more than one room anyways?

Bellamy just wants something functional. He wants four sturdy walls and a roof that keeps out rain. He wants a place to sleep at night to call his own, built by his own two hands.

Nobody really cares about Murphy’s opinions, of which he has many. They all know he’s only there because he’s bored. But every once in a while, he’ll offer real solutions that actually help. It’s something Bellamy noticed on the Ring – when he tries, he has good ideas.

Eventually, they start building. It’s harder work than Bellamy expected, but he enjoys it. There’s something incredibly satisfying about doing work that makes his muscles burn, and the rhythmic movements of chopping down a tree or sawing through a log give his mind time to rest, which he needs desperately after the past few weeks. The tight burn in his chest when he breathes reminds him every time that he’s still alive. They made it through the war, and all of them are still alive and safe in the Garden of Eden. He can rest.

His fight is finally over – just not the way he often thought it would end, and for that, he’s glad.

Monty, Raven – and even Murphy – are great help, and Bellamy appreciates it, but he insists on building most of the house himself. He’s the one to lay the foundations in place and to mark a space in the valley where he will construct the rest of his life. With every log he lays, he adds another detail to the picture of the future growing in his mind. He imagines children – siblings, brothers and sisters raised in a community that loves them and never once hidden from the world – free to live and grow and roam. On the doorframe here, he can mark their heights. Off to the side there, he can place their beds.

He imagines Echo at his side as their hair turns grey, her beautiful face cut through not with battle scars, but the marks of passing time. He pictures her sword hanging above their bed and books stolen from the bunker on shelves along the wall. He imagines filling their house with little things they love – the way you were never allowed to aboard the Ark. He pictures a future where he can own things, collect and keep and store things, and place them in the nooks and crannies of his house.

The picture of a future and a family the way he’s never quite known it grows in his mind, and a desperate want forms within him as the house takes shape.

 

* * *

 

The others make their own plans. Monty plans a house next to the garden he’s planting, and Harper finds berries through the valley to use as paint. She tells Bellamy she wants to make her house as colorful as the valley around them.

“Earth is so colorful,” she says reverently, staring at the wildflowers in the distance, little bursts of color along the horizon. “The ark was always so grey.”

Raven wants to fill her house with a table and a bench to work on, and she’s more excited about that than she is of the building. Emori doesn’t seem very inclined to leave her tent, perfectly content with the level of shelter and comfort it provides. Bellamy supposes it is already a step above cave floors and desert sand. Still, he plans to help her build one after he’s done with his own.

He doesn’t know what Murphy and Shaw are planning, though it’s clear they have no desire to remain roommates. Shaw is a great help to Raven, though. He helps carry out the necessary manual labor while she orders him around, and the look in his eyes makes Bellamy think he wouldn’t be happier doing anything else. It’s obvious he’s completely smitten with her, and, though Raven has never been good at expressing how she feels, it’s clear she’s just as smitten with him. One day, Shaw might just share the house they’re building with her.

Murphy doesn’t appear to have much motivation to do anything for himself, but he does as much as he can to help the others with their projects. It’s a welcome change from who he’d been on the Ring, and every time Bellamy sees him struggling under the weight of a log or wiping sweat off his brow from the effort, he feels a sense of relief. Gone is the lackluster shadow who slunk around hallways and pulled himself away from his family – now, he’s a constant part of the building effort, helping in any way he can.

He’s still avoiding Emori – and she’s doing the same to him – but the first time Bellamy sees Murphy and Monty laughing together freely in a carefree way they haven’t managed in nearly a year, he has to stop and expel a sigh of pure relief.

His family is safe. His family is whole again. And it’s healing.

Their little patch of Eden grows slowly, but surely. Every day they develop more plans: after the houses, a smokehouse for meats and a storage shed beside it. A place for meals, a place to gather. Bellamy lets himself settle into the promise of peace and prosperity and happiness, finally his for the taking.

He wishes, suddenly, that his mother could have lived to see it. Aurora would have liked it, he thinks. She would have been proud of who he’s become.

 

* * *

 

On a whim, Bellamy decides to try his hand at carving. Most of the base of the house has been completed, and he likes the idea of setting images into the wood that will make up the walls. A million different ideas come to mind. At first, he considers carving the story of the Iliad because it’s always been his favorite, but he’s had enough of war and doesn’t want it to touch his house. Perhaps the Odyssey, then – a story of a traveler trying to find his home again, facing monster after monster to make it back to his family.

Unfortunately, he overestimates his artistic ability. The characters come out unrecognizable and the story is lost. Undeterred, he switches to simple vines and leaves and flowers. It still isn’t anything remarkable, but it’s a fun project nonetheless. His hands miss with this kind of detailed, steady work. If he closes his eyes and focuses only on the movement, he’s back in his room on the Ark, mending old, tattered clothing beside his mother and his sister.

He’s immersed in this work when a voice he doesn’t expect speaks up behind him. “You’re building a house?”

When he whips around, it isn’t his imagination like he half-expected. Clarke really is standing there, looking no different from the last time he saw her after the war – just a little more tired, maybe, her hair a little more tangled.

Her eyes move from studying the foundations in front of him to his face, and she offers him a half-smile he can’t bring himself to return. All he can think about was the last time they spoke, the horrifying certainty that filled him when he realized she had left him to die, and the news over the radio that she had sided with McCreary and left his family to their fate.

When he doesn’t speak, Clarke’s smile falls. She glances out towards the space around them. “You could have taken a house that was already built.”

“No,” he says, finding his voice. “Diyoza’s men and Wonkru are probably fighting over them.”

“It’s not Wonkru anymore,” Clarke says, and he can’t identify the emotion her voice catches on. Six years later, she’s so different he feels like he can’t read her at all. Maybe she feels the same way about him. “It’s Bluma Kliron Kru.”

“Flower Valley people,” Bellamy translates. “That’s pretty.”

“It is,” Clarke says with a nod.

“Why didn’t Madi just keep the name Louwada Kliron?” he can’t help but ask.

“She said Louwada Kliron Kru was gone.” Clarke’s eyes are caught on something in the distance, but he doesn’t think she’s actually seeing it. “They had to be something new.”

“I think that’s true of all of us,” he says before he realizes what he’s saying. Clarke turns to meet his eyes. Her own are less blue than he’d remembered. He’d gotten the shade wrong in his memories. “We can’t live here and be who we were in other places. We have to be something new.”

Her mouth twists as she takes that in. He wonders what she’s getting from it – he’s not even really sure what he’s saying. “Is that why you’re building a house? The tents aren’t good enough anymore?”

Bellamy almost laughs. He wonders if she would too if she knew how much she sounded like Murphy just then. “Yeah, I guess so. I don’t want this to be like our old camp. I’m so much older now.” That almost makes him laugh too; he never thought he’d get to a point where he could complain about aging. It’s kind of nice. “I want different things. **I’m** different.”

“You are,” she agrees. “I am too, I guess.” He doesn’t say anything, but she must see his answer in his face, because she does that little half-grin again. Bellamy wishes he could read it better. He doesn’t know what it’s saying.

Clarke considers the house. “You know, now that I look back, our camp seems so silly, doesn’t it? A bunch of tents and a wall.” She laughs. It’s not quite a happy sound. It’s not quite an unhappy sound either. “I guess none of us really knew how to build a village.”

“I don’t know – if we’d asked Monty and Raven to, they probably could have figured it out.”

She laughs under her breath. “I get it, though. I lived in one of the houses here. It was the first time it really felt…. permanent, I guess. It felt like I had finally found a home on Earth.”

How strange, that they can still click in weird ways like this. He doesn’t know her anymore, and she doesn’t know him, and the relationship they once had is long dead and buried beside the people they used to be, but somehow, she understands this. It’s the first time he feels like they’ve been on the same page since he found out she was still alive.

“Yeah,” he says. It’s all he can say. His words for her withered alongside his words for Octavia. What can he say to these off-kilter ghosts in the form of people he once knew – these strangers with familiar faces?

Clarke must feel the same way. They hover on the moment together, shaky and unbalanced, the air stiff and stifling.

She’s the one to break the silence finally, because discomfort has never frightened her the way it frightens him. Like always, she forges ahead resolute – in the past that once impressed him. In the week leading up to the war for the valley, it only disturbed him.

“Good luck with your house,” she says sincerely, then turns to leave.

“Wait! Clarke,” he calls. She turns back to face him. “Are you living in your house again?”

Something cracks in her expression. “Madi is.”

“But you’re not?”

She doesn’t move at all, but her entire image transforms before his eyes. No longer does she look resolute and determined and severe like he’s always known her – she just looks lost. Lost and lonely and sad. “Too many people in the village now for my taste,” she says wryly with a shrug. “But it’s fine. I lived in the rover for months before I found Showada Kliron – it doesn’t bother me.”

Bellamy doesn’t call her on her lie. In his silence, she nods one more goodbye and turns to leave. He watches her as she walks away, growing further and further away, until she steps into the tree line and disappears all together.  

He wonders if it’s possible to spend so much time without people you forget how to exist amongst them.

How did he end up the most well-adjusted of the two of them?

A shout from the direction of the garden grabs his attention. Curious, he makes his way there, and as he grows closer he takes in the scene. Harper is laughing, wiping at the tears in her eyes with a purple hand that leaves streaks across her skin. In front of her, Raven’s face and her right shoulder are covered in the same purple; she looks startled, mouth still hanging open as Bellamy approaches.

All of them are here. Monty and Emori must have been tending to the garden before whatever happened to Raven made them pause. Both of them are covered in dirt. Emori has a streak across her eyebrow, and Monty looks like he’s somehow gotten it in his hair. To the side, Echo and Shaw are seated beside each other. In their hands are some of the bowls the group has managed to barter from the Eligius crew, and inside them are bursts of bright colors. Shaw’s hands are coated in a bright blue, and Echo’s in yellow. Even Murphy is here with the others, a bowl of red berries sitting in front of him.

It’s the paint Harper wanted to make, Bellamy realizes. While they’d left him to his carving, she must have roped the others into helping her mix up the pigments – then thrown some at Raven when she wasn’t paying attention.

“That’s a good look for you,” Shaw says, and Raven turns on him.

“Yeah?” she says, wiping the paint away from her eyes. “You know, I think yellow is probably **your** color.” She steps closer to him. Echo smirks and holds out her bowl for Raven to grab without prompting.

Shaw’s eyes widen. “Oh, no,” he says as he tries to scoot backwards to escape her. He’s not fast enough; Raven reaches him easily and dumps the bowl over his head.

The group bursts into a new round of laughter, while Raven smiles triumphantly at Shaw. “That’s a good look for you,” she tells him.

Bellamy stands there, taking all of them in. His cheeks ache with how wide his smile is. He chest feels like a dam overflowing. Echo turns and catches his eyes; her face melts like snow on a warm day. He feels his heart throb with wanting at the sight of it.

Oh, he thinks, looking at the seven of them. This is how.

 

* * *

 

As the winter chill settles in and the days grow shorter, the eight of them work harder to finish building before winter fully arrives. It’s clear they’re fighting a losing war. They started much too late in the season, and Bellamy resigns himself to spending the next few chilly months in their tents. Still, the houses are coming along nicely. Every time Bellamy stops to look around at what they’ve already accomplished, he feels a surge of pride.

At least the smokehouse is finished. It had been their first priority with winter fast approaching. Echo and Emori make an incredible hunting team. With Echo using her bow and Emori skilled at building traps, they manage to catch everything from deer to squirrels, and they end up with plenty of food to smoke and store for winter. Emori and Echo teach Harper and Murphy to butcher the meat and prepare it; Echo identifies the plants she recognizes as edible, and Murphy makes it his mission to experiment with them until he finds the best combinations, expressing more than once that he’s “so fucking glad they don’t have to eat flavorless plant mush anymore.”

Monty’s garden gives way to the first of the winter frost, so he dives headfirst into helping with the building efforts.

Raven keeps working on her table. She’s struggling alongside Bellamy learning how to carve, but eventually she manages to put together something with four legs and a flat top that doesn’t wobble when she places things on top of it. It’s the ugliest table Bellamy’s ever seen, but it’s functional and Raven beams the entire day after she finishes it, clearly proud of herself.

Almost a month after Bellamy first proposed building a house, Murphy goes to Raven with construction plans of his own for the first time. Bellamy watches from a distance as he shares them, clearly anxious, bouncing from one foot to the other and tapping his fists against his upper thighs as Raven surveys them. Her face cracks with a grin, then blossoms into a full smile, and she says something to him that makes his own face light with a hesitant smile.

Bellamy’s curious, but getting Murphy to open up when he doesn’t want to is often like pulling teeth, so he lets it go. It takes months to see the results. By that time, the three houses they’ve been working on are nearly complete, the process slowed slightly by the heavy snow they’d gotten at the harshest point of the winter season.

It’s a workshop.

It only has three walls and a ceiling and is far smaller than any of other buildings – only enough room for one or two people to work comfortably - but it has a long table only slightly less ugly than the one Raven built for herself and shelves set into the walls to store things on.

Bellamy watches with his breath caught somewhere in his throat as Murphy leads Emori to it and presents it to her. Even from a distance, it’s obvious she isn’t sure how to react. She freezes first, then hesitantly takes a step forward and studies the shelves. She runs a hand along the table and pushes against it to test if it will hold. Murphy stands off to the side. His hands can’t seem to still; they cycle from messing with his jacket zipper to tapping against his thighs to running through his hair. It’s standing straight on end by the time Emori finally turns to him.

And very suddenly Bellamy feels like an intruder on a moment not meant for him.

He goes to find Echo instead, suddenly desperate to hold her and tell her he loves her, while a kernel of hope blossoms in his chest.

 

* * *

 

Just because Murphy seems to be relearning how to fit back into the group, it doesn’t mean he and Shaw get along any better than they used to. Bellamy’s starting to think forcing them to share a tent ruined any short of friendship they could have formed, because they clearly despise each other as roommates.

Luckily, Bellamy’s house is nearly finished, which will leave an open tent that one of them can move into. It seems like it’s happening just in time, too. When he steps out of his own tent that morning, he catches the tail end of argument. Murphy’s half-inside the tent and half-out, shouting at Shaw about something he can’t make out. Bellamy hears Shaw shout something back before Murphy straightens and storms off to wherever he goes when he feels like he can’t exist around people anymore – it still happens more often that Bellamy would like, but it’s been happening less and less the longer they stay here, which is a relief. He can’t help but think of Clarke.

Bellamy goes to grab some meat for the smokehouse for breakfast and is just settling down on one of the logs positioned in a circle in front of the tents when Shaw finally emerges. His expression is tight with irritation. Bellamy thinks he might be muttering something under his breath.

“Hey!” he calls. When Shaw turns to look at him, he holds up some of the extra jerky. “Want some breakfast?”

Shaw takes a seat on the log across from and takes the jerky he offers eagerly with a quiet, “Thanks.” A lot about Shaw is quiet, Bellamy’s learned. He doesn’t seem to take up more space than he thinks he’s been given.

“So, Murphy,” he can’t help but ask. The other man’s face drops immediately back into anger. “You two not getting along?”

Shaw hesitates. Bellamy can almost see him trying to shape a passable lie in his head that isn’t an insult, before he just gives up. “Guy’s a dick,” he says.

Bellamy laughs. “He is,” he says, and then stops himself before he keeps talking, because the phrase that had almost spilled out was _but you can’t choose your family_.

It was something his mom used to say when he complained about Octavia or Octavia about him. When he was young, he once begged his mother to take her back – couldn’t he get a new sister who didn’t tear up his books or tug on his hair? He hadn’t yet realized the weight the word “sister” carried. “No, you can’t,” his mother had told him sternly. “You can’t choose your family, Bellamy. But you love them anyways.”

He doesn’t know if she was right or not.

He didn’t choose the six people he got stuck in space with. He didn’t choose the people who didn’t come with him, either. They got thrown together only by circumstance.

But they aren’t his blood, and he seems to hate his actual sister as much as he loves her these days, and choosing these six people over her in the end had come almost as naturally as breathing.

What Bellamy does know is that it doesn’t matter.

He is building his home in a village of people he loves. He chooses them now.

 


End file.
